Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Well, so did you,” he mused, shrugging.
“When I woke up and found you gone, I got worried.” He cocked his head—that eerie smile even more unsettling the wrong way up.
“It was when you took my phone to call that friend of yours, wasn’t it?
You looked through my call logs and saw I never called my aunt that night.
” He snapped his fingers. “Rookie mistake.”
I backed away until I hit the stair railing. What could I do? Did it even make sense to run? How far could I possibly get?
“You lied to me.” My hand shook holding up the plastic bag.
“You lied about everything. You were in my mother’s room that night—you!
And then you turned the clock back and swaggered into a change of clothes so that no one was the wiser.
And this whole time, you’ve sat back and watched me—watched all of us—twist ourselves into knots trying to figure out the truth. You’ve watched people die!
“How could you, Alex? How could you!?”
He blinked lazily in the face of my rage. “All right, sure, I may have told a few fibs—”
Fibs?!
“—but, honestly, I’m finding all of this outrage a bit hypocritical. I mean, who are you to talk about liars when you’re not Soo Min.”
A deep, chilling quiet pierced my soul.
“This whole time you’ve been pretending to be my wife while fooling my daughter, and sleeping with Micah and Rhodes.” He cocked a brow. “Naughty, naughty imposter.”
“I— I don’t know what y-you’re t-t-talking about.” Everything went white and cold. I didn’t know what a stroke felt like, but it had to be this. “You’re cr—”
“Oh, please, save it.” Alex straight rolled his eyes. “You got the look down, but for personality and mannerisms it’s an F-minus. The woman I married is cruel, selfish, greedy, and narcissistic. But you...?” he cried, leaning back and holding his hands out to me. “You’re perfect.
“You’re sweet, smart, funny, loving, and gorgeous.”
I couldn’t help it. Even then, his compliments made my heart flutter.
“You are my fucking dream girl, whoever-the-hell-you-are, and a change like that simply doesn’t happen overnight.
” He gave me a wry look like I was a misbehaving parrot.
“So, come on, out with it. You’re Sue’s sister, right?
Her twin sister? Either that or you’re some psycho fan who got plastic surgery to look like my wife. ”
“Sister,” I snapped. “I’m her twin sister, Sarang.”
That irritating smirk melted away as understanding dawned.
“Sarang? So that’s why Omma kept calling you that.
” He cursed under his breath like he was pissed he missed something obvious.
“The whole time I thought she was being sweet, but I should’ve known better.
That woman did not have a sentimental bone in her body. ”
“Don’t you dare!” I shouted. “Don’t you dare speak ill of my mother now after you—after you—!”
He cupped his hand to his ear, making a show of leaning in. “After I what?”
“After you killed her!”
“And there it is,” he crowed. “You’ve accused literally everyone else on the planet, it was only a matter of time before you worked your way to me. The only problem is that I didn’t do it.
“I didn’t kill your mother.”
“Then how do you explain this?” I ripped the tux out and shook it at him. “Let’s hear your slick-ass explanation for why the clothes you were wearing that night are covered in blood? Are you going to claim it’s someone else’s blood?”
“No,” he drew out. “It’s Omma’s blood.”
“I—” I choked. He came out with it so easily, my heart stopped.
“But I didn’t get blood on it from killing her,” he breezed, “and you can see that for yourself. The person who attacked Omma would’ve been covered head to toe, whereas I only got some smeared here and there on my tux.”
I couldn’t breathe. “What the hell is wrong with you? How can you stand there casual and lying like you did nothing wrong?”
“Because I did nothing wrong.” He took a step and I shouted, making him throw his hands up in surrender.
“All right, all right, chill.” Alex actually sounded a bit annoyed with me.
“It’s not as big a deal as you’re building up in your head.
I did go into your mother’s room that night, but she was already dead,” he dropped on my head like a ton of bricks.
“The minute I saw her, I knew my time was up.
I needed to find that thumb drive before a forensic team found it for me.
“I’d been looking for it for months—”
Visions flashed through my mind of that first day when I walked into Omma’s room and found Alex being all shifty and suspicious.
“—and I wasn’t going to pass up my chance,” he continued.
“Reynard was gone for the night. Everyone was downstairs preoccupied with the party, and there was an entire three-hour window before you were expected to look in on her. I had to find it, and stumbling on her dead body wasn’t going to stop me. ”
The callousness in his voice reflected the emptiness in his eyes.
“All that looking around got some blood on me,” he said, nodding at the plastic bag.
“But I finally found it in one of the bed posts. I unscrewed the top and there it was.” Alex shook his head, a tiny smirk tugging at his lips.
“Excellent hiding place, I’ve got to give Omma credit for that.
I wouldn’t even have thought to look there if the internet hadn’t given me the idea. Truly well done.”
I gaped at him. He’s nuts. A true and proper psychopath stands in front of me.
“Anyway,” he said. “I had to climb on the bedside table to reach it and I accidentally knocked over the clock and broke it. It occurred to me that I could use that to my advantage, so I moved the hands back.” He shrugged. “Simple, see? I didn’t kill your mother.”
“Simple, huh? Fuck you!” I bellowed, blowing his brows up.
“Because you’re lying. You’re still lying!
I don’t believe for a second that you were in her room and Rhodes was kicking it next door, and neither of you knew!
What’s even on this flash drive? Did you think it was another copy of the emails?
Is that why you three planned the second dumbest heist in history! ”
Alex cracked up. “Hey, no need to be mean,” he hooted. “Our first one wasn’t that dumb. We did get away with it after all.”
“You doorknobs spilled all the details in trackable, recoverable emails! You went to the same fucking school, why wasn’t it possible for you to do all your planning in person without a record?”
He blinked at me. “I... uh... Damn, that’s a good point. Shit, maybe we are doorknobs.”
“You are! And instead of owning up to it and accepting the consequences for being thoughtless idiots, you guys killed my mom to cover it up.”
“Again, we didn’t kill your mom. If we wanted her death, why wouldn’t we have smothered her with a pillow or slipped something in her morning tea?
Here’s a newsflash, baby girl, people don’t ask that many questions when an old lady dies of seemingly natural causes.
They just assume it was natural,” he said.
“Truth is we could’ve gotten her out of the way whenever we wanted, but that’s not what we wanted. ”
“We, we, we,” I hissed. “So you admit you were in this together.”
“I admit that it was Rhodes’s job to find the password and delete the email, and my job to find the backup evidence on the flash drive,” he said.
“Micah was supposed to stay downstairs and make sure you didn’t feel the urge to check on your mom sooner, but then he saw one of the officers sneaking Mrs. Finley into the downstairs pantry.
” He beamed at me. “Obviously, she wasn’t there to steal jars of our imported marmalade.
Micah figured her presence might come in handy, so he popped upstairs at one point just so people would believe it when he said he saw Mrs. Finley upstairs.
“But no part of the plan involved killing Omma, because, as I said, she was already dead when I went in there.”
My mind spun. Was any of that true? Was he lying to me again? Was he trying to get me to let my guard down, so he could do whatever he followed me here in the middle of the night to do?
“Why?” I rasped. “If you’re telling me the truth, explain why?
Why was it so important for you to get this drive, that you stepped over my mother’s body to do it?
You truly did something so cold and inhumane just to save yourself from some charges over the creation of a business you sold over ten years ago!
This”—I shook the drive—“matters to you so much!?”
Hard eyes met mine. “It matters more than anything. It’s all that matters,” he growled. “You don’t know this. I mean, you literally don’t know this since you haven’t actually been here for the last seven years, but I have nothing—fucking nothing—except for Lily.”
I reeled back. Lily?
“And your mother wanted to take her from me too.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “How could my mother possibly take Lily from you?”
Alex scoffed. Crossing his legs at the ankle, he leaned back against the doorframe—raking me up and down like he pitied me.
Or envied me.
“You have no idea,” he repeated. “Your sister has always seen us as trophies—billionaire trophies—except the billionaire part didn’t work out so well for her.
We all wanted to break up with her after that video of her throwing coffee on the waitress went viral, but Rhodes didn’t even get the sentence out before she blurted that she was pregnant. ”
I sunk down to the floor. I could already tell I wouldn’t like this story.
“We couldn’t leave our baby alone with that woman,” Alex stated, blunt as a truck, “so we agreed to the wedding and commitment ceremonies. All done very quickly, because Sue claimed she didn’t want a big belly in the wedding photos.